Index of the Disappeared: Watch This Space and Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archive Opening Reception and Artists’ Talk

Friday, April 18, 2014, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

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Co-presented with the NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

To mark the opening of two site-specific installations at NYU, Index of the Disappeared: Watch This Space and Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archive, Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani present their final talk as the 2013-14 A/P/A Institute Artists-in-Residence. A conversation with Maymanah Farhat follows.

RSVP by Wednesday, April 16 using the form below.

Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she currently lives and works. Her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations seek to excavate and circulate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art.

Mariam Ghani was born in New York and lives in Brooklyn. Her research-based practice spans video, installation, performance, photography, and text, and operates at the intersections between place, memory, history, language, loss, and reconstruction.

Maymanah Farhat is a New York-based art historian who has written widely on modern and contemporary Arab art. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Art Journal, Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and ArtAsiaPacific magazine, among others. In addition to her writing, she has curated exhibitions in New York, Beirut, Doha, and Dubai. Farhat is co-editor of Jadaliyya Culture and the Artistic Director of Ayyam Gallery.

About the Exhibitions:

Index of the Disappeared: Watch This Spaceis a series of posters and installations created specifically for the NYU Kimmel Windows Gallery. The works on view reference techniques for both conducting and evading surveillance, and reflect the chilling effects of pervasive and invasive surveillance targeting communication systems and political speech. The exhibition’s title alludes to a strategy used by some librarians to circumvent gag orders imposed by National Security Letters, which demand access to patron records. These librarians have posted public signs that warn: “We have never been served an NSL; watch this space for the removal of this sign.”

Index of the Disappeared: Watch This Space will be on view in NYU’s Kimmel Windows Gallery from Tuesday, April 15-Monday, May 19, 2014. The windows are located on LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street and are viewable from the street, 24/7.

Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archiveinstalls a library-within-a-library version of the Index archive in the Richard Ettinghausen Library at the NYU Kevorkian Center, integrating literary and media resources culled from the library’s collection, with primary source documents from the Index’s collection, to tempo- rarily re-design the library environment.

Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archive will be on view at the Richard Ettinghausen Library, NYU Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies (50 Washington Square South, entrance at 255 Sullivan Street) from April 7-May 12, 2014, Monday-Friday, 9AM-5PM except when occasional lectures take place. Please see neareaststudies.as.nyu.edu/page/events before planning your visit.